[FASTCGI] difference between apache's mod_fcgi, mod_cgid, and mod_fcgid?

[Rob Lemley]

Tom Bowden wrote:
> Is the difference between these modules just a matter of version?  I
> am using Apache 2.2+ server -- and it uses mod_fcgid... from what i
> can tell the big difference is that the configuration keywords are
> difference ( FcgidAuthenticator, FcgidAuthorizer, FcgidAccessChecker,
> FcgidWrapper, etc.).

mod_fcgid is a different project.  I've never used mod_fcgid.   It
appears useful in situations where many processes are somehow started
and you want the fcgid process manager to kill them when not needed.

We have one multi-threaded FastCgiExternalServer process per apache2
virtual host.  These servers never exit.  Therefore, I never saw the
advantage to the mod_fcgid "process management strategy, which
concentrates on reducing the number of fastcgi server, and kick out the
corrupt fastcgi server as soon as possible".

I'm not sure, but I guess if you had a single threaded fcgi server and
wanted to have the number of instances of it (processes) to grow and
shrink dynamically, then maybe that's the purpose of mod_fcgid.  In our
case, we can accept fastcgi requests about as fast as apache sends them,
because our accept loop immediately spawns a new thread to handle the
request and goes back to get the next request.

One user has reported much slower response times for mod_fcgid.

The fastcgi server library code is somewhat "scary", global variables,
unclearly documented return codes, etc.  But it seems to work well for
what we're doing.

We've had problems with mod_fastcgi versions on windows.  I think we
haven't been able to go above a certain version (2.8?) with the most
recent version of apache 2.

Rob